TRANSLATION RISK IN THE FIELD OF TOURISM

The holidays are an option for a  translation agency’s blog to find the issues occur while translating tourism websites, which lies somewhere between marketing and prospective translation.

For a travel and tourism market, that is characterized by globalization, the inevitable and irreplaceable means of communication is the internet. It has become very important that the information which is available about travel and tourism websites is translated accurately and efficiently into other languages.

TYPES OF SITES – WEBSITE TRANSLATIONS

In the field of tourism, there are three types of dedicated websites. These are:

1. Informational websites, which offers information about all the aspects of tourism field or industry.
2. Promotional websites, which promotes a specific destination.
3. Commercial websites, aiming to sell, and thus, put potential customers in contact having a wide range of service providers including tour operators and travel agents.

IMPORTANT CONCEPTS IN WEBSITE TRANSLATION IN THE FIELD OF TRAVEL AND TOURISM

The overall success of tourism area in a specific country or a place depends mainly upon the marketing strategy that is adopted to promote the destination. In most cases, these strategies should include the websites that are translated into a number of languages. In the field of tourism, as in marketing industry, the translators should have knowledge of these three concepts, listed by Bert Esselink:

• Localization: culturally and linguistically adapting the product meeting all the needs of target audiences.
• Internationalization: generalizing the product just to make it compatible with multiple languages as well as cultural contexts. The main goal of internationalization is facilitating localization.
• Globalization: adapting/ disseminating a site or product to the requirements of different regions or countries.

COMMON ISSUES WITH WEBSITES AND LOCALIZATION

In the tourism and travel sector, the website translation aims to make the proposed product that fit local needs. Doing this, the translator may face three types of problems. These are as follows:

Cultural Problems:

They refer to identifying the translation issues inherent to another text to be translated, a translator needs to find the parts of documents that should be rewritten or must be adapted to you’re their target audiences. The destination is not always described in the way, as for Spanish audiences, tends to gain detailed information, facts and figures, in the way, as for English audiences, which prefer more aesthetic and emotional portrayal.

Language Problems:

As with a financial or medical translator, a tourism translator must be able to detect all the textual elements that arise from cultural preferences in order to make them more understandable to the target audiences. The case is specifically for proverb, set phrases, and sayings.

Technical Problems:

Just like business translation, translation of a tourism website also presents some technical risks, including the presence of many keywords.

Translation of travel and tourism websites, given that their main purpose is global, that presents the translator a number of challenges, which includes knowledge of specific linguistics peculiar to travel and tourism industry, same as technical translation, as well as the mysteries of technical issues inherent to the website translation.